Herbert Stothart (11 September 1885 - 1 February 1949) was the veteran composer for the MGM studio who wrote and arranged music for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
Biography[]
Stothart started out on Broadway, and later moved to Hollywood, where he became a prolific in-house composer for MGM. His work on The Wizard of Oz won him his only Academy Award. The music for the film's songs was composed by Harold Arlen - though Stothart shared credit with Arlen for the song "Optimistic Voices" ("You're out of the woods, / You're out of the dark...").
Stothart in turn headed a staff of arrangers, and at times the line between composer and arrangers bent and their functions blended. Assistant conductor George Stoll and arrangers George Bassman and Robert Stringer composed bits of music for the film, sometimes following Stothart's guidelines. Stringer wrote the music that accompanies the deadly poppy field scene, while Bassman composed for the tornado scene. The music behind Dorothy's first encounters with the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman, and much of the music for the Emerald City and haunted forest sequences in the film, was credited to Stothart, Stoll, and Bassman in MGM records.[1]
Stothart and his staff freely employed "quotations" from other musical works in his score, as did other Hollywood composers. The escape of Dorothy and her companions from the castle of the Wicked Witch is accompanied by an excerpt from Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, while Toto's earlier escape is to Mendelssohn's "Scherzo in E Minor" from Three Fantasies, Opus 16. Schumann's "The Happy Farmer" is heard in the Kansas sequence. The song "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree" is used in the scene of the fighting apple trees, with "Reuben and Rachel" during the tornado.[2][3]
Awards[]
Stothart received 12 Academy Award nominations and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Wizard of Oz.
- 1939 Best Original Score Film – The Wizard of Oz
Academy Award Nominations:
- 1935 Best Scoring Film – Mutiny on the Bounty
- 1937 Best Scoring Film – Maytime
- 1938 Best Original Score Film – Marie Antoinette
- 1938 Best Scoring Film – Sweethearts
- 1940 Best Original Score Film – Waterloo Bridge
- 1941 Best Music, Scoring a Musical Picture – The Chocolate Soldier
- 1942 Best Music, Scoring a Dramatic or Comedy Film – Random Harvest
- 1943 Best Music, Scoring a Musical Picture – Thousands Cheer
- 1943 Best Music, Scoring a Dramatic or Comedy Film – Madame Curie
- 1944 Best Music, Scoring a Dramatic or Comedy Film – Kismet
- 1945 Best Music, Scoring a Dramatic or Comedy Film – The Valley of Decision
Works[]
Herbert Stothart's movie scores include:
- Devil-May-Care (1929)
- Rasputin and the Empress (1932)
- Queen Christina (1933)
- The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)
- What Every Woman Knows (1934)
- Anna Karenina (1935)
- China Seas (1935)
- David Copperfield (1935 version)
- Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
- Naughty Marietta (musical score only; the songs were by Victor Herbert, Rida Johnson Young, and Gus Kahn) (1935)
- A Night at the Opera (1935, which also used music by Giuseppe Verdi, Ruggero Leoncavallo, and Nacio Herb Brown, with some lyrics by Arthur Freed)
- A Tale of Two Cities (1935)
- After the Thin Man (1936)
- The Good Earth (1937)
- Marie Antoinette (1938)
- Idiot's Delight (1939)
- The Wizard of Oz (Oscar: Best Original Score; songs by E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen)
- Northwest Passage (1940 film by King Vidor)
- Pride and Prejudice (1940 version)
- Come Live With Me (1941)
- Blossoms in the Dust (additional uncredited music by Daniele Amfitheatrof) (1941)
- Mrs. Miniver (additional uncredited music by Daniele Amfitheatrof) (1942)
- I Married An Angel (1942)
- Random Harvest (1942)
- The Human Comedy (1943)
- Madame Curie (1943)
- National Velvet (1944)
- Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)
- Dragon Seed (1944)
- The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (additional uncredited music by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1945)
- They Were Expendable (1945 World War II film by John Ford) (1945)
- The Green Years (1946)
- The Yearling (arrangement of Frederick Delius's music) (1946)
- The Sea of Grass (1947)